How Big Is a RAW File? RAW File Size From 1,840 Camera Files (2026)

Published September 28, 2026 · Daniel Tello · RevelRaw

A RAW file from a current camera is about 27 MB: the median of 503 camera-format files uploaded to raw.pixls.us since 2020, with half between 20 and 47 MB (RevelRaw, September 28, 2026).

Every card-capacity article on the web starts from one assumed RAW size, usually 30 MB, and every forum answer quotes the one camera the poster owns. Nobody had measured sizes across brands, normalized them per megapixel, or checked the manuals against real files. So we took the full index of the raw.pixls.us public-domain archive and measured all of it. Still deciding whether RAW is for you? Shooting RAW versus JPEG is the step before this one.

How many RAW photos fit on a 32, 64, 128, 256 or 512 GB card

A 24 megapixel camera fits about 2,557 lossy or 2,149 lossless RAW photos on a 64 GB card, 5,114 or 4,299 on 128 GB, and 10,228 or 8,598 on 256 GB. Those counts come from the archive, not from an assumed size: for each row we took every full-resolution file in the megapixel bin and compression tier from the brands that offer tiers (Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Canon, Samsung and Pentax), used the median as the representative frame, and divided the card's usable space by it.

"Lossy" is Nikon Compressed, HE and HE*, Sony Compressed, Fujifilm Compressed and Canon C-RAW; "Lossless" is Nikon, Sony and Fujifilm Lossless plus Canon's standard RAW. The 24 MP bin holds files storing 23.5 to 26.9 megapixels, 33 MP holds 30 to 34.5, 45 MP holds 44 to 47.9 and 61 MP holds 60 to 62.5. The 24 MP lossy row is a mix of 29 Sony Compressed, 34 Nikon Compressed (only about 87% of Lossless), 14 Canon C-RAW, 6 Fujifilm Compressed and 6 Nikon HE and HE* files; C-RAW and HE shooters do better than that row, because their 24 megapixel files run about 12 to 17 MB, roughly double the count. The 33 MP row mixes C-RAW (13.5 to 34 MB) with Sony Compressed (23 to 41 MB), and the 45 MP row mixes C-RAW (16.8 and 27.5 MB) with Nikon HE, HE* and Compressed (24 to 51 MB), so their medians fit neither group; use the per-camera tables below for those bodies. Counts assume 99.5% of the card's printed capacity is usable and round each file up to whole storage blocks (32 KB on a 32 GB card and 128 KB on larger exFAT cards, per the SD specification's file-system table as summarized on Wikipedia, both in binary kilobytes).

The arithmetic for the most common case, a 24 megapixel camera in a lossy mode on a 128 GB card: 128 billion bytes, 127.36 billion of them usable at 99.5%; a 24.88 MB file, or 24.9 MB once rounded up to the card's storage blocks; divide, and 5,114 frames fit. The 30 MB assumption the top-ranking card articles use gives 4,260 on the same card, close for a lossless 24 megapixel camera and 20% pessimistic for a lossy one.

Two cautions. The 99.5% figure is our assumption, not a sourced one; a conservative 96% takes 3.5% off every count (4,934 in the worked example). And counters can land on either side of this table: they vary by body. Sony's a7 V implies bigger files than our sample (33.5 versus 23.3 MB), Canon's R6 Mark II smaller ones (its manual says 1,170 RAW frames on 32 GB where our lossless row gives 1,076). Trust your camera's counter over any table. CFexpress cards follow the same arithmetic; the card type changes write speed and how fast the buffer clears, not how many frames fit. To measure a body's real per-frame size first, try our free sample RAW files.

Why your 128 GB card only shows 119 GB

The missing gigabytes are a units mismatch, and it touches file sizes too. Card makers count 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, so a 128 GB card holds 128 billion bytes. Windows, many cameras and older software count 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes, and 128 billion divided by that is 119.2. Apple's storage-capacity note (February 26, 2025) spells out both conventions and says iOS 10 and earlier and OS X Leopard and earlier reported in binary, so any newer Mac, Finder included, shows the card near its printed 128 GB while a Windows PC shows about 119. Formatting then sets aside a small share for the file system tables. The SD Association defines SDHC cards (over 2 GB up to 32 GB) as FAT32 and SDXC cards (over 32 GB up to 2 TB) as exFAT, hence the two block sizes in our card table.

The same trap sits inside file listings. The raw.pixls.us archive labels its sizes "MB" but counts them in binary megabytes, 1,048,576 bytes each; all 78 files whose exact byte counts we had from earlier lab work matched the binary reading and none the decimal one. The archive's figures therefore read about 4.6% low compared with Finder, or put the other way, the decimal figure is 4.9% higher: the a7 V Lossless file the archive lists as 42.15 MB is 44.20 MB in Finder. Canon's and OM System's manuals use binary megabytes as well; Nikon's unit is unclear; Sony and Fujifilm publish counts, not sizes. Before comparing a website's file size with what your Mac shows, check which megabyte it is using.

Why are RAW files so big?

Megapixels. A RAW keeps one brightness value per sensor pixel, so pixel count sets the baseline: twice the pixels, roughly twice the file. Within one compression tier the per-megapixel cost is steady across brands (about 1.0 MB lossy, 1.2 lossless and 2.0 uncompressed), so the rules of thumb in the quick answer work whatever the logo on the camera.

Bit depth. Most cameras store 12 or 14 bits per pixel, and on formats that pack the data the extra two bits cost real space: a Nikon D850 Lossless file at 14-bit is 55.2 MB and the 12-bit file from the same day is 43.6 MB, 27% smaller. Sony's uncompressed and older compressed formats store a fixed number of bits per pixel, so a 12-bit Sony file is no smaller; our Sony compression study goes into that.

Compression mode. The biggest lever after pixel count. Uncompressed formats put each 14-bit value in a 2-byte slot, so a 24 megapixel sensor produces about 48 MB of sensor data before the preview (the 16-bit container is documented in diglloyd's 2015 look at Sony uncompressed). Lossless compression packs the same values like a zip archive and gets them back exactly; in our same-day pairs it ran 53 to 63% of uncompressed. Lossy modes discard some precision, 34 to 51% of uncompressed on Fujifilm, Sony and Nikon; Canon has no uncompressed mode, and its C-RAW runs 57% of Canon's lossless RAW.

The embedded preview. Every RAW carries a JPEG of itself for the camera's screen and for thumbnails, and it is part of the file size, typically 1 to 5 MB; one Adobe forum poster measured a 9 MB difference between a full-size and a medium preview in the same DNG.

Scene and ISO. Compression works by finding repetition, and noise has none, so busy or noisy frames compress worse. Canon's manuals say that "File size varies by shooting conditions (such as cropping/aspect ratio, subject, ISO speed, Picture Style, and Custom Functions)", and a 2009 PetaPixel test on one camera (old, single-source) found ISO 3200 files 44% larger than ISO 100 in low light and 5.7% larger outdoors. Where the archive holds two files from the same body in the same mode at the same pixel count, they differ by up to 47% (a Canon G7 X Mark III in C-RAW: 21.4 and 31.3 MB). Uncompressed modes are immune: our 15 modern Sony uncompressed files varied 4% per pixel, Canon C-RAW files 39%, the widest spread of any mode.

The dataset: RAW file size by format

Across all 1,540 full-resolution single shots, old bodies and every compression mode mixed together, the median file is 23.51 MB and the median per-megapixel cost is 1.22 MB, with the middle 80% of files running from 11.2 to 57.6 MB. Split by format family, the picture looks like this.

Full-resolution single shots only. "Middle 80%" is the 10th to 90th percentile. Families with fewer than 16 such files (Minolta, Kodak, Leaf, Epson, Mamiya, Nikon NRW and others) are in the dataset but not in the table. The MB-per-megapixel column is the median of each file's own ratio, so it does not equal median MB divided by median megapixels. DNG mixes phone files at about 2 MB per megapixel with in-camera DNGs from Leica, Pentax, Ricoh and Hasselblad at about 1.4.

The mainstream mirrorless formats cluster: Sony, Canon CR3, Nikon and Panasonic all land between 1.05 and 1.22 MB per megapixel because most of their archive files are in a compressed mode of some kind. Fujifilm sits higher at 1.54 because half its files are uncompressed, the default on many X bodies. Format matters less than mode.

Methods footnote: the 176 excluded index rows were 68 firmware-hack dumps, 46 without a usable pixel count, 18 cinema-camera frames, 21 files written by converters or noise-reduction tools rather than a camera, 6 Raspberry Pi captures, 5 film scanners, 5 outliers, 4 DNGs from brands that do not write DNG in-camera, 2 firmware files and 1 flagged as truncated. Same-body mode ratios use two full-resolution files from one body uploaded on the same day by the same contributor, with the same bit-depth label where both carry one and pixel counts within 12%.

RAW file size by camera

The tables below cover 52 current bodies we looked up by name, with every compression mode the archive holds for each. Almost every cell is a single file, so read each one as "one photographer's frame from this camera came out at this size" and use the mode percentages in the next section to fill the gaps. Where a cell has more than one file it says so and gives the median.

Sony

Canon

Nikon

Fujifilm

OM System, Panasonic, Pentax, Ricoh and phones

Megapixels are the camera's output size where our earlier Sony lab measured it and the stored size from the archive otherwise. One file per cell unless stated. "No file" means the archive holds none in that mode; "not offered" means the camera has no such setting. The two Zf lossy files carry no mode label; we assigned HE and HE* from their size ratios to the Lossless file (43% and 63%), which fall inside the HE and HE* ranges measured on five other bodies. Files uploaded by different people on different days are different scenes, so compare modes within a row before comparing across rows.

One Panasonic note. The G9 II, GH7 and S5 II files came out at about 1.55 to 1.64 MB per megapixel, above the 1.22 median for the RW2 family, while the S9's single file sits at 1.15. RW2 has one mode, so there is no setting to change; this is an observation about three current bodies, not a rule for the format.

RAW file size by compression mode

The per-camera cells are single scenes, so to measure what a mode setting does we compared pairs: two full-resolution files from the same body, uploaded on the same day by the same contributor, in different modes, which controls for the camera and, nearly always, for the scene. There are 249 such pairs across Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm and Canon, 109 of them lossy versus lossless, and in all 109 the lossy file was the smaller one.

Each row is a median of per-pair ratios. Canon's standard RAW is losslessly compressed and Canon offers no uncompressed mode, so its row compares C-RAW with lossless.

Nikon

Nikon's older lossy setting, the one its menus call Compressed, saved only 13% over Lossless (52 pairs, 26 bodies), which makes Lossless the obvious choice on every Nikon that offers both. The High Efficiency modes on the Z8, Z9, Z6III, Z5II and Z50II are a licensed compression scheme called TicoRAW, per its maker's December 2021 announcement, and they cut far deeper: a Z8 frame goes from 60.8 MB Lossless to 35.8 MB HE* to 24.4 MB HE. The background on the format is in what a NEF file is.

Sony

Sony's guide calls its Compressed setting "approximately half" the size of Uncompressed, and the archive agrees, with every one of 23 pairs between 50 and 58%. The a7 V is the outlier in the Compressed-versus-Lossless row at 53%, because its Compressed format is new: its compressed file is 23.31 MB where the a7 IV's is 40.66 MB at the same 33 megapixel output, 57% of it, though that is one file from each camera by different contributors, and Sony's own shot counts (3,800 versus 2,800 on 128 GB) imply a gentler 74%. Compressed (HQ) is the same size as plain Compressed. What each mode does to the picture, tonal steps and burst buffers included, is in how Sony's compression modes compare; the format itself is in what an ARW file is.

Fujifilm

Fujifilm uncompressed RAF costs 2.04 MB per megapixel across 74 files, and it is the default on many X-series bodies. Fujifilm's X-T5 manual says Compressed files are "25 to 35 percent of their uncompressed size" and lossless files "about 30 to 90 percent"; ours landed at the top of the first range and in the middle of the second. On an X-T5 that is 85.7 MB uncompressed, 43.1 MB lossless or 28.0 MB compressed for the same 40 megapixels. More on the format in what a RAF file is.

Canon

C-RAW cut Canon's files to 57% of standard RAW, but with the widest spread of any mode, 41 to 69%, so a card estimate for C-RAW needs more margin than any other. Dual Pixel RAW is the other Canon multiplier, measured on two bodies: it took the R6 Mark II's 29.4 MB RAW to 50.1 MB (170%) and the R5's 40.6 MB RAW to 73.5 MB (181%), with the C-RAW versions at 154 and 163%. The CR3 container and its history are in what a CR3 file is.

Everyone else

Panasonic RW2, Olympus and OM System ORF and Pentax PEF have one mode each, so there is nothing to compare: 1.22 MB per megapixel for RW2, 1.0 for ORF and 1.28 for PEF. Phase One's IIQ L cost 1.09 and its smaller IIQ S 0.73, Hasselblad's 16-bit files 1.53, and Sigma's Foveon X3F files 3.24, because that sensor records three color layers for every pixel location.

What the manual says vs what the files measure

Canon, Nikon and OM System print a file size in their manuals; Sony and Fujifilm print only shot counts. The manuals never name the unit, but Canon's and OM System's shot counts fit binary megabytes (1,048,576 bytes, the unit cameras and Windows use) almost exactly: 32 billion bytes divided by 26.1 binary MB gives 1,169 frames, and Canon's R6 Mark II page says 1,170; the R5 works out to 672 (Canon says 670) and the OM-1 Mark II to 2,725 (OM System says 2,727). So a manual's "26.1 MB" is about 27.4 MB in Finder, which counts in decimal (multiply by 1.049). Nikon's counts fit neither unit. The table shows our archive files in binary MB, the manufacturers' own unit; the rest of this article stays in Finder's decimal MB.

One archive file per row except the R50 (median of two). Manual figures as printed, fetched September 28, 2026: Canon R6 Mark III, R5, R6 Mark II, R8 and R50; Nikon Z8, Z6III and Zf; OM System OM-1 Mark II. Nikon prints its sizes as approximate. Nikon's shot counts on the same pages do not multiply out against its own MB column in either unit (7,300 Z8 Lossless frames at 51.6 MB would fill 377 to 395 GB of the 660 GB card it quotes), so we used only the MB column.

For standard RAW, Canon's numbers landed within 5% on the R6 Mark III and R8, 7% under our R6 Mark II file, 17% over our R5 file and 13% under our R50 files, so the manual is a fair midpoint rather than a ceiling. The C-RAW gaps are larger in both directions: R8 +6%, R6 Mark II +19%, R50 +39%, R5 −27%, the scene dependence of C-RAW again. Nikon's Lossless figures ran 12 to 15% under our files on all three bodies, and its HE and HE* figures 5 to 12% under. Each archive file is one frame of whatever its contributor shot, so for a Nikon Z8 in Lossless, plan on 52 to 58 MB per frame in the camera's units, 54 to 61 MB in Finder's.

Sony gives shot counts instead of sizes, which lets us compare what the counter assumes with what our files weigh. Sony's a7 V help guide lists 3,800 Compressed frames, 3,800 Compressed (HQ) frames and 2,600 Lossless frames on a 128 GB card. With the card assumptions used above, 3,800 frames implies about 33.5 MB per Compressed frame, versus 23.3 MB for our one a7 V Compressed file, a test chart at ISO 100 in a new variable-rate format; 2,600 Lossless frames implies about 49.0 MB, versus our 44.2 MB file. Counters can land on either side of our table, and they vary by body: the a7 V's and the R5's imply bigger files than our samples, the R6 Mark II's, R8's and R50's smaller ones. Trust your camera's counter over any table.

Which RAW mode should you shoot?

The pairs above settle it for most bodies. Nikon: Lossless over Compressed, because Compressed saves only about 13% and gives up data to do it; HE* when the card is the constraint. Fujifilm: lossless instead of the uncompressed default, for half the file and the same sensor data. Sony: Lossless unless card space or the burst buffer binds, with the a7 V as the exception, where Compressed is about half the Lossless size (53%), versus 78 to 92% on other Sony bodies; our Sony study's verdict table covers the buffer trade-off body by body. Canon: C-RAW roughly halves the file but varies the most with the scene, so leave margin on the card. Whether to shoot RAW or JPEG at all is a separate question, covered in our RAW versus JPEG editing comparison.

Phones: iPhone ProRAW

Phone RAWs cost about 2 MB per megapixel, the rate of an uncompressed camera file, because most store uncompressed DNG: across 82 phone DNGs in the archive the median is 24.45 MB for a 12 megapixel frame. Apple's ProRAW support page (April 19, 2024) puts an iPhone ProRAW at "approximately 25 MB" at 12 megapixels and "approximately 75 MB" at 48 megapixels; the one ProRAW in the archive, from an iPhone 12 Pro, is 29.19 MB at 12.2 megapixels. A 48 megapixel ProRAW therefore outweighs a Nikon Z8 Lossless frame. The iPhone 16 Pro's JPEG-XL ProRAW option is reported smaller, around 45 MB lossless and 20 MB lossy per MacRumors (September 20, 2024), but Apple gives no JPEG-XL figures and the archive holds no such file. Editing starts with our ProRAW guide. A Google Pixel 8 Pro DNG is 45.1 MB at 50 megapixels, so it is compressed.

The extremes

The largest file in the archive is not a single photograph: a Sony a7R III pixel-shift composite, a four-frame ARQ file, weighs 340.87 MB for 42.6 megapixels, about 8 MB per megapixel. The largest single shot is a Hasselblad X2D 100C frame at 213.31 MB for 105 megapixels, with a Hasselblad CFV 100C, a Phase One IQ4 150MP and an uncompressed Fujifilm GFX100S all within about 3 MB of it. The smallest file above 20 megapixels is a GoPro HERO10 Black at 6.07 MB for 23.3 megapixels, 0.26 MB per megapixel, thanks to video-style lossy compression. The smallest file we trust is a 1990s Kodak EOS DCS 3 frame at 1.37 MB for 1.3 megapixels (a 0.84 MB Kodak DC120 file is smaller, but its twin in the archive is flagged as truncated).

FAQ

How big is a RAW file?

About 27 MB for a current camera: the median of 503 camera-format RAW files uploaded to the raw.pixls.us archive since 2020, with half between about 20 and 47 MB. Per megapixel, lossy modes cost about 1 MB, lossless modes 1.1 to 1.3 MB and uncompressed modes about 2 MB, so a 24 megapixel camera writes roughly 25, 30 or 50 MB by setting. A 61 megapixel Sony file is about 70 MB compressed and 125 to 135 MB uncompressed.

How many RAW photos fit on a 64, 128 or 256 GB SD card?

A 24 megapixel camera fits about 2,557 lossy or 2,149 lossless RAW photos on 64 GB, 5,114 or 4,299 on 128 GB, and 10,228 or 8,598 on 256 GB, using the median size of our archive files for each tier and 99.5% of the card's printed capacity. A 45 megapixel camera fits about 3,433 lossy or 2,341 lossless on 128 GB. Camera counters land on either side of those figures, so trust yours over any table.

Why are RAW files so big?

Because a RAW keeps one 12- or 14-bit brightness value for every sensor pixel, before any of the processing that lets a JPEG throw detail away. Uncompressed formats store each value in a 2-byte slot, so a 24 megapixel sensor produces about 48 MB before the embedded preview JPEG adds 1 to 5 MB. Lossless compression packs that to 53 to 63% of the size; lossy modes reach 34 to 51% of uncompressed, or 57% of lossless for Canon C-RAW.

How much bigger is RAW than JPEG?

About 2.4 to 3.4 times for standard RAW in eight Canon and Nikon manuals: the Canon R6 Mark III lists RAW at 34.3 MB and its largest fine JPEG at 10.4 MB. Canon C-RAW is about 1.6 times the JPEG, and Nikon High Efficiency 1.0 to 1.1 times, the same size as a fine JPEG on the Zf. HEIF is about the same size as JPEG on Canon bodies, while Sony's a7 IV fits about twice as many HEIF frames as JPEGs.

Does lossless compressed RAW lose quality?

No. Lossless compression is reversible, so the sensor data comes back out unchanged; Sony's a7 IV guide says it causes no deterioration in image quality and Fujifilm's X-T5 manual calls its lossless option reversible with no loss of image data. The modes that discard data are Canon C-RAW, Nikon High Efficiency and Nikon's older Compressed setting, Sony Compressed and Fujifilm Compressed. Nikon's Compressed saves only about 13% over Lossless, so on a Nikon the lossless setting costs very little.

Why does my 128 GB card only show 119 GB?

Card makers count 1 GB as 1 billion bytes, so a 128 GB card holds 128 billion bytes; Windows and many cameras divide by 1,073,741,824 instead and display about 119 GB, per Apple's storage-capacity note (February 26, 2025). Formatting reserves a little more. Nothing is missing. Finder has reported decimal units since Snow Leopard, so a Mac shows the card near its printed capacity. File sizes shift the same way: the archive lists a 44.20 MB file as 42.15 MB.

Sources for the JPEG and HEIF comparison: the eight manuals linked in the manual section (Canon R6 Mark III, R6 Mark II, R5, R8 and R50; Nikon Z8, Z6III and Zf), whose RAW-to-JPEG ratios run from 2.35 on the Zf to 3.36 on the R5 and whose C-RAW-to-JPEG ratios are 1.6 on every Canon; Sony's a7 IV recordable-images page (10,000 HEIF Extra fine versus 4,700 JPEG Extra fine on 128 GB); Adobe's JPEG vs RAW explainer (undated, "2 to 6 times") and Ask Tim Grey (March 19, 2015, "2 to 3 times"); Sony's a7 IV RAW file type page for the lossless wording.

Editing any of these on a Mac

File size decides how many frames you bring home. What happens next is the same at 6 MB or 213 MB: the file has to open and be edited. RevelRaw is our native macOS RAW editor. It opens the 24 formats on our format list, every brand in the tables above and iPhone ProRAW among them, then AI scene detection ranks 40+ curated presets for the photograph. Everything runs on your Mac and nothing is uploaded.

Related reading: Shooting in RAW vs JPEG · Every RAW format RevelRaw opens · Free sample RAW files (CC0)